A 52X
CDROM is not the fastest on the market (that would go to Kenwoods 72X), but it
is very speedy. The needs of a good solid fast CDROM are pretty obvious, but
where the Samsung SC-152 really shines is on price. The SC152 uses the
standard geared motorized tray mechanism and can be mounted horizontally or
vertically depending on your case. Both the full sized 120mm CD's and smaller
half-size 80mm CD's can be read. The front bezel is clean with just an eject
button, indication LED, headphone jack and volume wheel for audio disk playback.
The drive is virtually identical to other Samsung optical units, and comes with
128KB of buffer memory.

On the rear of the drive
Samsung have included along with the standard IDE/Molex Power/Analog Audio
Connect, a two-pin digital audio output terminal. However, only the four-pin
analog audio cable is included with the drive. This cable needs to be plugged
into the motherboard or sound card if you want to listen to CD's through the
computer. The SC-152 comes with that four-pin audio cable, a 40-pin IDE
cable, sound mounting screws, and manual.

We made
sure that the drive was set to DMA to get the best possible results from it. If
you are unsure of how to set your drive to DMA a short explanation is included
in the instructions. T
he first benchmark we used to test the read capabilities of
the SC-152 was E-Testinglabs CDWinbench.

The e-TestingLabs CD
Winbench99 benchmark runs a series of scripted programs from a special CD in the
drive and measures the time and data transfer capabilities as a result. Higher
numbers mean better performance.

CD-WinBench 99 Benchmark Results

Test Drive

Results

1.

Samsung SW-224 (CD-RW)

1320 kb/s

2.

Samsung SC-152 (CDROM)

1710 kb/s

3.

Pioneer DVD-500M (DVD ROM)

2440 kb/s

4.

Samsung SW-216 (CD-RW)

1280 kb/s

The

SC-152 does very well compared to the
other Samsung products in this list of reference optical drives. It should be
noted that the Pioneer DVD-500M is a 16X DVD drive, so the higher results there
are not unexpected. We are mainly concerned with comparing the 52X SC-152 against
a broad range of optical devices likely to be in the average computer. In the
past we would only have used other CD-ROM drives, but I think it is fair to
broaden that to simply optical drives these days. In any case, the SC-152 is
fast, as we might have expected.

CD Speed is a CD-ROM benchmark which can test the
most important features of a CD-ROM drive. In this particular test we use a
pressed CD-ROM with about 640MB of data as the test disk. Using a CDR or CDRW as
the test disk may (or may not) impact the results slightly, so the pressed disk
is the de facto standard.

Samsung SC-152 - CDSpeed Data
Tests

Nero CD Speed 99 - Data
Benchmarks

Optical Drive

SW-224

SC-152

DVD-500M

SW-216

Disk Type

Data

Data

Data

Data

Avg Speed

30.82x

38.90x

32.30x

24.94x

Random Seek Time

87ms

86ms

86ms

94ms

1/3 Seek Time

91ms

105ms

100ms

112ms

Full Seek Time

137ms

181ms

164ms

192ms

CPU use: 1X

1%

1%

0%

1%

CPU use: 2X

3%

2%

1%

2%

CPU use: 4X

7%

4%

2%

5%

CPU use: 8X

11%

8%

3%

9%

Disk Recognition Time:

9.15s

6.30s

0.01s

-

Disk Eject Time

1.12s

1.05s

1.19s

1.19s

Disk Load Time:

1.10s

1.14s

7.26s

1.14s

During the CD-Speed data transfer tests, the CPU usage
remained lower than the previous Samsung drives, but not quite as low as the
Pioneer DVD drive. With CPU usage peaking at
8%, the usage was respectable. Average disk speeds were the highest of all
the reference drives at 38.9X. The drive appears to have peaked at 52X
which complies with the rating it has received, and the overall speed is
healthy indeed. Comparatively, the Pioneer DVD drive was only capable of an average rate of 32X.